InBlack wrote on Feb 15, 2013, 10:35:Beamer and Bats you are both forgetting or disregarding the leaps and bounds intelligent software is making with regards to going through mountains of data both textual and visual.

The NSA is already basically "combing" the desert with regards to internet traffic both domestic and international, and DARPA is developing blimp drones that will be able to monitor hundreds of square miles of territory up to a resolution of a few centimeters.

Manpower is not key here, smart AI like software is. And that shit is pretty damn smart already.

Manpower is an issue.

We can track faces, but it will be decades before computers can identify what those faces are doing.

It's easy in Afghanistan - just try to match who is holding a gun. In the US? Much harder to see what's going on.

Again, though, I'm against this. I just don't think it's likely to be anything useful for police. This doesn't mean I don't think they'll try it, anyway, and that we should sit back and say "eh, it will never work." Screw that, we shouldn't let them try.